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Deconstructeam's Archive

TRYING TO MAKE A POST-APOCALYPTIC DEBT-COLLECTING SANDBOX

I’m really fond of game jams, prototyping and experimenting. I truly believe that the best way of learning how to make games is to just make games, and to fail as much as you can. In this aspect, Fear Syndicate Thesis, our game for Ludum Dare 33, has been a great learning experience.

The theme this time was “You are the Monster”, and the idea behind our entry was to make a post-apocalyptic debt-collecting sandbox. Don’t ask me why, but on paper, chasing helpless people, beating them and dragging them through the dirt with your rope looked like fun at the moment. After all, the theme was to make the player experience the role of the monster, and this activity seemed quite monstrous to me.

We worked frantically to fit everything we could inside this over-scoped game, we felt confident, and hell, we got the world-travelling, narrative system, action, economy… a lot of stuff done and ready in just the first 2 days. And then the last day came: content creation. I had a story ready about a guy who starts working for a syndicate which rules over a dried lake: whoever wanted to start a business in that land had to ask for this syndicate’s permission and couldn’t refuse their funding. The main character’s sister could not keep up to the debt payment, so the syndicate took her husband as a slave until they could repay the debt. This was the initial setting for the game, so the idea was that you’d start collecting debts for a good cause, but in the process you would harm a lot of people and, in the end, when you manage to pay your brother-in-law’s debt, you’d go back home to find the house burnt to the ground and your family hanged with a blood graffiti reading: MONSTER. But then I made the first mission.

IS VIOLENCE NOT FUN?

This first mission was about looking for some people who built a church, the world was big, so you started wandering and talking with NPCs that gave you hints to find this church: “I think this church is south from here”, “It’s a normal house with a tiny cross on the door”, “I heard they all wear purple”… following this leads, you arrived to the church, and started chasing them and beating them to the ground while they dropped money and blood. It wasn’t fun. It made me feel bad. I learned that violence without challenge, without an opposing force, is not fun, is the opposite of fun. At least, if you’re not that kind of player who enjoys beating random pedestrians on Grand Theft Auto.

I tried to look for a way to make it fun, but there wasn’t enough time to add challenge, enemies or to substantially fix the horror behind this gameplay. For the first time ever on a Ludum Dare, I said to my friends that I was sorry to waste their work in art and music: I decided to give up, I wasn’t going to submit this. So I tweeted about giving up. However, as part of the magic of Ludum Dare, some people replied encouraging us to finish. Just submit! That’s the philosophy behind Ludum Dare! They were damn right. Game jams are meant to experiment, to learn and to have fun.

FAIL BETTER

So, at this point there were only 6 hours left. What can I do with all of this that could be relevant? This game makes me feel bad, how can I avoid that? Couldn’t get anywhere and the clock was ticking, so I finally faced the question of why should I avoid this game making you feel bad. Then decided to convert it to a “poem about violence”. In less than 6 hours, I mixed all the assets mindlessly in an attempt to create pointless entertainment around violence just to lead the player to the reflexion that violence implies deeper things than just hitting and killing things. I wanted to share what I experienced developing the empty fun behind violence without opposition. I also used the opportunity to experiment with Game Maker Studio and played with the camera, coloring, scaling and other things to represent how the main character loses his shit as you keep obeying the syndicate for no apparent reason. The final result is quite bad, but Fear Syndicate Thesis taught me far more things than other game jams with which I was satisfied. I learned about fun, about myself and to not fear failure again. We should all fail more often, and game jams are the perfect environment for that!

Ludum Dare 27 game jam concluded and Deconstructeam gave birth to a little dungeon puzzler called Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew. In this game you play as Dr. Dogan, who along with his men just raid the tomb of an ancient god whose curse fell upon them: just 10 seconds of life left. Luckily, the weak spot of this god is the black amber, and the dungeon is full of them. In order to escape the temple, you’ll have to combine wisely you team skills and manage accurately the 10 seconds of life of each crew member if you expect to making out alive.

We are pleased with the result, a humble game with a correct duration. However, this time we had other motives beyond the pleasure of making a game in just a weekend: with the Game Maker: Studio license recently acquired (thanks to the funds of our recent crowdfunding campaign), Ludum Dare presented itself as an excellent opportunity to make an intensive training and finally take the leap from ImpactJS to this new game engine.

I had already made my first steps with the free version of Game Maker, but never made and finished a full project, pretty important matter to me. So, since this game engine is going to be my intimate partner during the development of Gods Will Be Watching, I grabbed the documentation, and stepped into making a game in less than 72 hours. The result stands for itself, a proper game, with several flaws, but a game nonetheless. My verdict: highly satisfied with what Game Maker: Studio has to offer and with how it’s going to improve our production power. Even having to learn along the way, the development speed increased notably in comparison with my beloved ImpactJS, not to metion of its huge variety of supported platforms. With few adjustements, Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew was working perfectly on browser and Windows.

I don’t know about you, but personally had many prejudices against Game Maker, particularly through the “Make games without programming skills” slogan. Once I tried his drang’n’drop interface and procured to keep myself far away from it. But knowing that Locomalito‘s games or the same Hotline Miami, were developed with this game engine, I finally decided to give Game Maker a chance, taking as guarantee this games which I worship for their high quality. Great surprise since once left behind the point’n’click programming thing, I took a deeper look at this scripting language GML (Game Maker Language) and discovered its high flexibility and the variety of tools and functions at your service which make your life quite easier regarding the most usual practices when developing a game (mostly about the collision handling).

I’ve never programmed with such agility as in Game Maker, and with no doubt Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew would have been much harder to create with ImpactJS. I’m happy knowing that Gods Will Be Watching is going to become a highly polished product and, despite the fatigue that brings a game dev marathon of 72 hours, I’m eager for working even more than before.

Hi Everybody! Do you remember Gods Will Be Watching from last #LD26 “Minimalism”? We got tons of incredible feedback from Ludum Dare and ranked 2nd place in mood and overall! That encouraged us to go for a huge remake and try to take our chances on the commercial scene and become one of those “Success stories”. Since we want to improve our development power and aim to create a really huge polished game for several platforms (Including PC, Mac, Linux and Mobile devices -iOS and Android-), we launched a crowdfunding campaign to get a little push in our way.

We are making a big game. Our first big game. Our last entry, Gods Will Be Watching, had an unexpected success on Ludum Dare and beyond, harvesting good words from press and players around the world, we are truly amazed. We lived from game jam to game jam during a year, and now we feel ready to face our first commercial project, finally we feel that our work worths money.

We don’t want just to make the game bigger, but deeper. The remake won’t be just about surviving on a hostile planet, but to overcome several difficult situations that will expand both the storyline and universe of sergeant Burden and his crew, and will offer new moral dilemmas in order to stay alive.

Moreover, we want to improve the AI of the characters. This is one thing that was left over from the original one since we ran out of time during the Ludum Dare, but we intended to change the attitude of the crew members depending on the events, deaths, and state of the full team. Some sort of “empathy system” where one action not only affects its target, but its neighbours. For example: If you kick one person on the floor, the friends morale drops down. (Yes, you will be able to kick people on the floor)

We also plan to improve the feedback that the game offers to the player. We learnt a lot from watching gameplays on youtube, so thank you to all of you who took the time to play and upload it, you really helped to polish the new game design!

Also, since finishing the original minigame wasn’t compelling enough, we plan to add rewarding cinematics for those who complete each puzzle, which can vary depending on the ratio of success of the player (eating your friends won’t be as rewarding as keeping everyone alive!)

We hope you like this project as much as we are enjoying its development! You can follow us on twitter, facebook and tumblr for supporting us, see more screenshots and concepts and keep up to date of our progress. Thank you!

As an extra, here you are a glimpse to the work in progress of our musician, Fingerspit

This. Is. Amazing.

We didn’t expect this. Gods Will Be Watching was our little minimalistic puzzle game for Ludum Dare 26, and we were happy with it, but, seeing it appearing it all over the internet, and receiving more than 10.000 plays per day was totally unexpected.

We are overwhelmed. Took us several days to recover from the 72 hours effort and being able to face all of the blog posts, tweets, mails, gameplays at youtube… we need to thank so many people!!!!

Here’s a selection of GWBW‘s unbelievable (at least for us) journey on the press:

Will Gods Be Watching?

We hope so! Since the game got a great acceptance both by press and public, and a lot of people told us they want more, we’d love to expand Sgt Burden’s and his crew universe. A lot of ideas came to us during this week on how to develop the game concept further without losing his essence, and we are thrilled with what we have to offer in the future, so stay tunned!

We finished on time!! UNBELIEVABLE!! For the first time on our ludum dare history, here we are, publishing a game 1 hours before the deadline. Also, we are very satisfied with the results, the “Minimalism” condition really helped us to get the project on time. Gods Will Be Watching is a minimalistic survival/adventure game with multiple ways of completing it and failing. We hope you enjoy playing

I would like to introduce you to our October Challenge game: Newbie Conviction.

We’ve been living in a Jam for the last month trying to finish this game on time. Its development began 3 months ago and we rushed ourselves to make it on time when we heard about the October Challenge.

Newbie Conviction is a Post-apocalyptic Steampunk Hacking Simulator in wich you take the role of Newbie, a young hacker that helps the Resistance to fight against a cyborg menace on a distant distopic future. We recognize that the gameplay is very strange, and it can be difficult to learn how to play since discovering the core mechanics intends to be a puzzle itself, but at least, we are happy to come up with something original.

It’s the first time we try to make some money from making games, and being aware that the final result is far away from being professional we opt for a humble way of earning our first dollar: Donations with a reward. We packed up a collection of goods such as a 30 page Artbook, Original Soundtrack, the Source code, A Cubeecraft of the main character, and more! Donators will access the reward via Sellbox.

We learnt a lot with this project, as being our first medium-big project, with an estimated duration of 2~3 hours. We learnt most of all about the DON’Ts of Game Design and Game Development in general. Also a bout the limitations of browser based games (Too much content for such a small platform, and too bad optimization too :P). We grew a lot as a team, and that’s reward enough for these 3 months of work, but a dollar will make us even happier 😀

What an odissey. For the 24th edition of the Ludum Dare, with the given theme Evolution, I decided to try developing a conversational adventure, wich I thought will suppose less work than other type of genres… ERROR. In a more typical game, with its platforms, monsters and other details, one developed the concept and gameplay, It’s “just” (not meaning easy) about expanding that world, designing new levels and making the game experiencie wider with elements wich had already been well defined. On last LD, with much less experiencie in game gev, I built Deconstructorium and finished lots of hours before the compo time limit. Moreover, counting that most engines come very well prepared for the platforming genre.

Ages of Irving is a Torture/Interrogating Simulator game with a short story at the background. Believing that the conversational genre won’t steal me so much time, I allowed myself the luxury of designing an art and context rich and well defined. In the end, I not simply failed to finish within 48 hours, but submitted my entry on the very last second of the 72 hours Jam mode, and with just the half of the content I planned.

Creating a deep conversation system, with enough possibilites, actions and reactions from a lot of different characters, generates a huge amount of variables. “This will be just a matter of writting”, I said. I present you the “profile” of just one character so you can make and a idea of the volume of the game. Epic fail on me.

http://pastebin.com/tWLdwNrg

I designed 20 characters. 5 for each phase of Irving’s life, which would have guaranteed a richer gameplay and more liberty as for the ratio of killing/confesing targets (In addition to more context for the story). It was planned that solving 2 of 5 cases you could advance in the game. Now, with just 2 o 3 per level you just need one of them.

The music is also missing this time. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to finish a compo with sound 😛

We plan to work on a more polished version, including all the things that were left over and publish it on clay.io.

I’ve been working for all the day and i’ve noticed I didn’t made any update at all. So, here I come.

This is my first Ludum Dare, and it started friday with an epic breainstorming full of beer and tequila. Saturday, began with a hell of a hangover but an interesting idea. José Cuervo told me: “Hey, how about a game in wich you are a mad scientinst that owns the ability of reducing himself to an almost atomic level, and travels trough common objetcs and extracts special molecules and then uses them to craft some great gadgets o obtain new powers.”

So that became “Deconstructorium”.

This is the main room, with the "visitable objects"

When you click on to an object, you travel inside of a metaphoric representaion of the atomic view of the item. We’ll find a basic platformer. If we complete de level we’ll obtain a new molecule of that item type.

"Atomic" view of an item

There are some levels that are plainly impossible to complete if you don’t get some special powers first. I.E. you cannot complete a single Oranges level if you did’nt crafted some coffe molleculles for gaining more speed. In order to get new powers, we should go to the Deconstructorium, room that names the whole game. Here will appear floating the molleculles we gained. Dragging a molleculle on to another, if they are compatible, will trigger a reaction and grant some new powers to the protagonist.

Inside of the Deconstructorium

This is a work in progress, I planned to add seven different types of molecules and the main objective will be to gather all seven in order to… destroy the world? 😛

The game is developed in HTML5 with ImpactJS. You can play a probably buggy version at http://www.jordidepaco.com/ludum23/ , I upload frequently my progress so, expect any sudden changes from a visit to anoher. The left door doesn’t works and you would have to refresh the browser if you fall from it 😛

Thank you from reading and excuse me for my poor english. I’m enjoying a lot my first Ludum Dare 😀